AT&T Expands Managed Storage Push

Computerworld - AT&T Corp. introduced an e-mail archiving service last week, joining other telecommunications companies that are trying to convince corporate users to add managed storage services to their voice and data contracts.
AT&T said it will use EMC Corp.'s Centera disk array with message archiving software developed by KVS Inc. to run the new service. The archiving capabilities are designed for financial services firms and other users that want to offload the e-mail retention, documentation and retrieval work mandated by regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and SEC Rule 17a-4.
Rivals such as Verizon Communications, MCI and Qwest Communications International Inc. also are trying to leverage their copper and fiber-optic lines to transport data to managed storage facilities or to help companies extend their storage-area networks (SAN) to off-site disaster recovery data centers.
But at the Storage Networking World conference in Phoenix, several IT managers said they have become wary of outsourced storage services since a group of start-up storage service providers quickly foundered and died during the past few years.
Outsourcing functions such as data archiving and SAN management isn't attractive to many large companies because they already have sufficient internal resources to do the work themselves, said Mark Detert, director of data center and automation operations at Visa U.S.A Inc.'s debit processing services unit in Englewood, Colo.
Andre Mendes, chief technology integration officer for the Public Broadcasting Service in Alexandria, Va., said that from what he has seen, managed storage services are not yet "fully baked."
"If it could be guaranteed to have the same availability as a well-architectured [internal] storage network, then we're getting there," he said.
Mendes added that talented storage administrators are easier to find and less expensive to hire than they were four or five years ago during the dot-com boom. "We're not likely to experience a shortage of personnel anytime soon," he said.
But in December, Chicago-based Tribune Co. hired AT&T to extend its disaster recovery architecture and manage its storage infrastructure.
"One nice thing with them we liked is they formed really good partnerships with Nortel and Sun," said Darko Dejanovic, chief technology officer at Tribune and its Tribune Publishing Co. subsidiary. "The whole solution worked really well between the three of them."
In an interview prior to Storage Networking World, Dejanovic said he decided to outsource the extension of the media company's SAN to a secondary site three miles from its main data center because doing the work in-house would have been cost-prohibitive. "It's the traditional insurance argument: how much risk do